A column on writing from Editor & Publisher May 9, 1981.

Lead Times

The formula Who? Did what? So what? is the best way I know to get at a lead. But I can forget that the answer to So what? sometimes has to do with the many, many times in an event.

Straighten out the various times in your account and an otherwise hard-to-find beginning often presents itself. In the following masterly UPI lead on an ordinary story, no fewer than five clues in three different times take the reader by the hand:

"With five days to go before he reveals his economic recovery plan, President Reagan on Friday held fine-tuning conferences with Cabinet members and mulled over the still-undecided question of an effective date for a tax cut."

1. When did Reagan hold the conferences? Friday. This is standard in a Saturday morning lead to show the timeliness of the story, why it was printed this day.
    
   
2. When will his plan be revealed? "... five days to go." The details that could be learned were in the body of the story.
    
   
3. When does the tax cut start? "Still-undecided." Deft, tucking the non-event into an adjective.

This kind of mastery doesn't come by asking yourself the necessary but merely preliminary "WWWWWH?" Who? What? When? Where? Why? One little When? is rarely enough. It took me years to learn that I had to take time out to ask When? in 10 different ways or I would slide past something important.

When? generates only one kind of time answer. To get the different, and sometimes more significant facts, ask, "How often? How soon? How long? How fast? Since when? Until when? Before what? After whom? At the same time as what else?

Where to put yesterday? Since time immemorial, time-stressed editors have tucked it in before the verb it modifies. Awkward, yes, but sometimes that's the best place: "Fire Commissioner Sloe Berne Monday pronounced the department's new nylon ropes 'the safest.' " But that spot should be your last choice.

• After an intransitive verb (without an object), put it directly after the verb it modifies: "Hi Jinks won yesterday despite the odds" " Jinks announced Tuesday at City Hall that he would retire."
   
  
• After a transitive verb (with an object), the most readable place to put the time is usually after the object.
   
  "Happy Lee announced his decision Tuesday to ...." "Jinks won the match yesterday as expected." "... President Reagan held fine-tuning sessions on Friday."
   
  Take care: "Police said Friday [that] safety measures would be recommended." Safety measures is not the object of said. The saying was done on Friday; above all, Friday must not be placed next to would be recommended.
   
  
• Sometimes a string of phrases follows the object with the answers to Who? WHere? How? and the others. Try putting the time last. "Two men with shotguns mugged the wife of a Soviet diplomat at the United Nations Monday." Or, in time-honored news style, slip it in before its verb: "Two armed men Monday mugged..."
   
  
• Use a date when you would confuse the reader with only the day of the week. Printed Sunday, May 17: "Main Street will be closed Monday, May 25, for repairs." The Monday is redundant, to be sure, but that's how most of us would remember the time to avoid Main St.

For more on time, see #14, Marking Time.

Ethel Grodzins Romm is a writer and editor currently living in New York City. She is the author of The Open Conspiracy: What America's Angry Generation is Saying (review) (auction with cover), several of the Strategies in Reading workbook series and others. She appeared in the film Paranormal: Science or Pseudoscience? She has written columns on language for Editor & Publisher, The American Bar Association Journal and many others. She is currently working on a book on management.